Hard Candy
by David Slade
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Ellen Page, G.J. Echternkamp, Odessa Rae, Patrick Wilson, Sandra OhDirector: David Slade
Brand: Lions Gate
Cinematographer: Jo Willems
Producer: Alex Webster
Producer: Barney Jeffrey
Producer: Brian Nelson
Writer: Brian Nelson
Producer: David Higgins
Producer: Ellora Chowdhury
Producer: Erica Farjo
Producer: Hans C. Ritter
Producer: Jody Allen
Producer: Michael Caldwell
Producer: Paul G. Allen
Producer: Richard Hutton
Producer: Rosanne Korenberg
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Subtitled); Spanish (Subtitled); English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo
Format: Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, DVD, NTSC, Widescreen
Picture Format: 2.35:1
Running Time: 104 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2006-09-19
Audience Rating: R (Restricted)
Studio: Lions Gate
Movie Reviews of Hard Candy
Movie Review: Nothing's yours when you invite a teenager into your home...
Summary: 5 Stars
Whether you love it, or loath it, one thing that I think most people can agree with is that "Hard Candy" signals the arrival of a major new talent... Ellen Page, co-staring as "Hayley Stark," alongside Patrick Wilson's "Jeff Kohlver." For someone so young - only 15 or 16 when she made this - Page's performance is astonishing. One minute she's a fumbling and embarrassed teen almost out of her depth on her first date with an older man, the next, a terrifyingly twisted and disturbed angel of vengeance, determined to visit bloody retribution on a man she accuses of being a pedophile, and possibly even a murderer.
This basic scenario is given to us up-front in the film's marketing material, and in the Amazon review above; I'm guessing that the filmmakers thought they HAD to give away the old-switcheroo at the outset, otherwise, how many people would go to the theatre to see a film about a pedophile stalking a 14yr old girl?!
The initial meeting between Hayley and Jeff at the Nighthawks Café - a kind-of Starbucks knock-off but without the Internet access! LOL! - is masterfully handled, especially by Page. It's almost as if she isn't acting at all, in an extraordinarily nuanced performance, the body language, the flickering and uncertain expressions, the fumbled gestures and words are so natural that you really believe you're looking at a young girl barely into her teens. And that's quite a trick, considering that we KNOW she's going to transform into the teen-psycho-slasher-babe-from-Hell in a very short period of time!
And lest you think this review is turning into a fully paid-up member of the Ellen Page fan club - LOL! - let's NOT forget Patrick Wilson's performance as Jeff. Wilson has an incredibly tough job to do here; we the audience suspect, we think we know, that he IS the monster Hayley will soon accuse him of being, but we can't be sure, so we have to be able to sympathize with Jeff, at least to a degree, and Wilson's performance compliments Page's beautifully. In this initial meeting, after weeks of on-line chatting, Jeff is smooth, urbane, cultured and sophisticated, as Haley says, "You really just don't look like kind of guy who needs to meet girls over the Internet." In fact, Jeff, a successful fashion photographer, is so hip and so cool that he even drives one of those funky new Mini Coopers around town. But something dark and edgy hides just beneath the surface, and we get a glimpse of that in his reply to Hayley's previous compliment, "...When you work as a photographer you find out real quick peoples faces lie." "Does my face lie?" is Hayley's guileless response.
After this initial set-up the action quickly moves to Jeff's house in the LA hills via a vaguely unsettling scene where, at Hayley's urging, Jeff gets down on his knees and "worships" her in the parking lot. There's also a nicely edited sequence where we see Hayley's steely resolve peeking out for the first time from behind the "cute" exterior in a self-satisfied smile to herself as they wind their way through the hills. To say that Jeff AND Hayley both harbor secrets is putting it mildly!
Once they arrive at Jeff's home, which doubles as his photographic studio, things take a very serious turn for the worse - for Jeff! - and it's here that the film really takes off, and spends the majority of its 100+ minute running time. To say that things become intense is an understatement; the majority of the film is just Hayley and Jeff on screen together, figuratively and metaphorically tearing each other to pieces, the camera follows them around, prowling through the house in extended takes reminiscent of Hitchcock's "Rope."
Jeff finally understands that things aren't going as, he planned, when he wakes up from one-too-many Screwdrivers tied to a chair with a shirt over his head. His oh-so-cute and beguiling ingenue is nowhere to be seen, having been replaced by a brittle and explosively violent whack-job stridently accusing him of being a child molester!
I won't go into what happens next as many other reviews have already covered that, some, in fact, appear to fixate on Hayley's proposed act of "preventative maintenance" as if that's all there is to the film, but once again, just as in the opening scenes at Nighthawks, what makes this work for me are the masterful performances.
Hayley veers, frighteningly, between barely controlled anger, sneering contempt, feigned concern, and seething rage that boils to the surface repeatedly. One of the most telling scenes for me is one where Jeff almost escapes, and after barely managing to subdue him, Hayley turns her rage and anger at losing control of the situation, against herself... ouch!
When Jeff is initially faced with Hayley's accusations of pedophilia and maybe even murder, he reacts in the only way he can, blustering self-righteous denial and outrage at the very suggestion. But as his situation becomes progressively worse, as Hayley digs ever deeper into his secret world, and lets him know what she intends to do, he desperately tries to find a way to "get through" to her. As a professional photographer he's used to being in control of situations, of communicating his ideas and wants to the models he shoots, of getting under their skin, to see what makes them tick, so that he can draw that ever elusive "something" out into the open and capture it on film. But Hayley is more than a match for him, she contemptuously throws his attempts at empathy back in his face, 'til he's reduced to whining, blaming others to justify his own past actions, and ultimately begging her not to destroy him.
These scenes are strong meat, emotionally draining, and lead, via the much-talked about "maintenance" sequence - which IS squirm inducing! - to an inevitable and nihilistic ending. I'm not saying that the resolution to the film is telegraphed or easy to spot - I didn't see it coming 'til it was too late, as it were - but given the set-up and the situation the characters find themselves in, there was no other way to finish the story, and to that end it is, to my mind, eminently satisfying.
Mind you, as much as I obviously thoroughly enjoyed "Hard Candy," the film is not without its flaws; one particular scene of Hayley manhandling an unconscious Jeff had me thinking "No WAY!" and some of the situations do feel somewhat forced and contrived. Ultimately though, and whatever its drawbacks, the two stellar central performances by Page and Wilson, as the terribly damaged Hayley and Jeff, are what bring me back to this film again and again. If you're anything like me those performances will keep you riveted to the screen, unable to look away, 'til the last image fades to black.
Summary of Hard Candy
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